The Divya Prabandham

The Divya Prabandham is the collective corpus of the passionate
hymns of the Alvar mystics
(5th-8th centuries A.D.). It was the scholar-saint Nathamuni
who, in the 10th century, retrieved and compiled this bhakti
treasure which is the pride of Tamil classical literature.
The Sri Vaishnava guru parampara (inheritance order of the
preceptors) is held to commence from Lord Sri Narayana himself,
and to centre, rightly so, around Sri Nathamuni and his grandson
Sri Yamuna. The Alvars represented all the caste-groups of the
society and their works enjoy the status of "dravida" or Tamil Veda,
on par with the "girvaana" Veda in pre-Panini Sanskrit. The
Divya Prabandham is in the form of adoration of the deities of
108 temples (divya desams)
situated in different parts of the country, and employs every form of
poetics (aNi) and prosody (chandam) available in Tamil.

The version presented here was
typed in by a small group of volunteers in 1994. To download the
entire collection of poems, click here for the
DOS version (zipped) or here for the Unix version (tarred and
gzipped).